This book, published in 1978 by Harvester Press and Humanities
Press, has been out of print for many years, and is now online.
This online version was produced from a scanned in copy of the
original, digitised by OCR software and made available in
September 2001.
Since then a number of notes and corrections have been added. Not
all the most recent changes are indicated below.

PDF VERSIONS NOW AVAILABLE

A
PDF file of the whole book,
can be downloaded
containing everything listed below (apart from news items in this
file) in a single file.
(Size about 3 MBytes.)

Some Reviews and Other Comments on this Book

NOTE added: 4 Oct 2007; Updated 15 Dec 2014
I have discovered that a review by Douglas Hofstadter is available
online: here.

BULLETIN (New Series) OF THE AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
Volume 2, Number 2, March 1980
Copyright 1980 American Mathematical Society
0002-9904/80/0000-0109/$03.75
The computer revolution in philosophy: Philosophy, science and
models of mind
by Aaron Sloman, Harvester Studies in Cognitive Science Humanities
Press, Atlantic Highlands, N. J., 1978, xvi + 304 pp., cloth,
$22.50.
Reviewed by Douglas R. Hofstadter
(The review rightly criticises some of the unnecessarily aggressive
tone and throw-away remarks, but also gives the most thorough
assessment of the main ideas of the book that I have ever seen.
Like many researchers in AI (and probably most in philosophy) he
regards the philosophy of science in the first part of the book,
e.g. Chapter 2, as relatively
uninteresting, whereas I still think understanding those issues is
central to understanding how human minds work as they learn more
about the world and themselves. Some of my recent work is still
trying to get to grips with those issues in the context of a
theory of varieties of learning and development in biological and
artificial systems, e.g. in connection with
the CoSy robotic
project.)

Note added: 15 Dec 2014 (Also at end of Chapter 2)

A review of this book was published by Steven P. Stich, in 1981
Review of:
The Computer Revolution in Philosophy: Philosophy, Science and Models of
Mind,
by
Aaron Sloman.
Reviewed by Stephen P. Stich
The Philosophical Review,
Vol. 90, No. 2 (Apr., 1981), pp. 300-307

Several of the reviews published in response to the original book are
now available online, e.g.
Donald Mackay's review
in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Vol 30 No 3 (1979),
which castigated me for not reviewing previous relevant work by Craik,
Wiener and McCulloch.

Philosophical relevance

Some parts of the book are dated whereas others are still relevant both
to the scientific study of mind and to philosophical questions about
the aims of science, the nature of theories and explanations, varieties
of concept formation, and to questions about the nature of mind.

In particular,
Chapter 2
analyses the variety of scientific advances
ranging from shallow discoveries of new laws and correlations to deep
science which extends our ontology, i.e. our understanding of what is
possible, rather than just our understanding of what happens when.

Insofar as AI explores designs for possible mental mechanisms, possible
mental architectures, and possible minds using those mechanisms and
architectures, it is primarily a contribution to deep science, in
contrast with most empirical psychology which is shallow science,
exploring correlations.

This "design stance" approach to the study of mind was very different
from the "intentional stance" being developed by Dan Dennett at the same
time, expounded in his 1978 book Brainstorms, and later
partly re-invented by Alan Newell as the study of "The knowledge Level"
(see his 1990 book Unified Theories of Cognition). Both Dennett
and Newell based their methodologies on a presumption of rationality,
whereas the design-stance considers functionality, which is possible
without rationality, as insects and microbes demonstrate well,
Functional mechanisms may provide limited rationality, as Herb Simon
noted in his 1969 book The Sciences of the Artificial.

Relevance to AI and Cognitive Science

In some ways the AI portions of the book are not as out of date as the
publication date might suggest because it recommends approaches that
have not yet been explored fully
(e.g. the study of human-like mental architectures in
Chapter 6);
and some of the alternatives that have
been explored have not
made huge amounts of progress (e.g. there has been much vision
research in directions that are different from those recommended in
Chapter 9).

I believe that ideas about "Representational Redescription" presented in
Annette Karmiloff-Smith's book Beyond Modularity summarised in
her BBS 2004 article with pre-print
here are illustrated by my discussion of some of what goes
on when a child learns about numbers in Chapter
8. That chapter suggests mechanisms and processes involved in
learning about numbers that could be important for developmental
psychology, philosophy and AI, but have never been properly developed.

Some chapters have short notes commenting on developments since the time
the book was published. I may add more such notes from time to time.

More recent work by the author

A draft sequel to this book was partly written around 1985, but never
published because I was dissatisfied with many of the ideas, especially
because I did not think the notion of "computation" was well defined.
More recent work developing themes from the book is available in the

Information about the online version

The book has been scanned and converted to HTML. This was completed on
29 Sep 2001.
I am very grateful to
Manuela Viezzer
for photocopying the book and to Sammy Snow for giving up so much time
to scanning it in. Thanks also to Chris Glur for reporting bits of the
text that still needed cleaning up after scanning and conversion to
html.

The OCR package used had a hard task and very many errors
had to be corrected in the digitised version. It is likely that many
still remain. Please report any to me at A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk.

It proved necessary to redo all the figures, for which I used the
TGIF package, freely available for Linux and Unix systems from these
sites:

In CHM format (out of date version)
For users of Windows, Michael Malien kindly converted the html files (as
they were on 8th June 2003)
to CHM format, also packaged in a zip file:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/crp-chm.zipNB: the chm files are now out of date as there have been many
corrections and notes added since 2003.

For most readers and especially users
of linux/unix systems it will normally be more convenient to
fetch the whole book as one pdf file, or fetch
the crp.tar.gz or the crp.zip files mentioned above. These are
more up to date.

NOTE on educational predictions

The world has changed a lot since the book was published, but not
enough, in one important respect.

In the Preface and in Chapter 1 comments were made about how the
invention of computing was analogous to the combination of the invention
of writing and of the printing press, and predictions were made about
the power of computing to transform our educational system to stretch
minds.

Alas the predictions have not yet come true: instead computers are used
in schools for lots of shallow activities. Instead of teaching cooking,
as used to happen in 'domestic science' courses we teaching them
'information cooking' using word processors, browsers, an the like. We
don't teach them to design, debug, test, analyse, explain new machines
and tools, merely to use existing ones as black boxes. That's like
teaching cooking instead of teaching chemistry.

Hardcopy version previously available

(This offer is out of date, but remains here as a tribute to the efforts
of Manuela Viezzer and Ceinwen Cushway before a PDF version was available for
download.)

You may still be able to find second hand versions of the original
book via Amazon and other booksellers, though it will not, of course,
include the notes and additions now in this online version.

A rather messy copy of the original book with some pencilled annotations
I made around 1985 when thinking about a second edition, was photocopied
by Manuela Viezzer several years ago (two pages side by side per A4
sheet) and may be ordered from the librarian in the School of Computer
Science for UK £10(GBP), to cover photocopying, binding and
posting in the EU.

For airmail postage to other countries check with Ceinwen Cushway (address
below).

NOTE: it is a messy photocopy as the pencilled comments have
not come out very clearly. It is probably better to print the online
version, which has the pencilled annotations integrated and also a
number of new notes, comments, and references. All of the chapters
are now available in PDF format, which is more suited to printing
than the HTML versions.

Anyone paying by cheque/check should make it payable to
The University of Birmingham, NOT to me.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 2.5
License.
If you use or comment on my ideas please include a URL if possible,
so
that readers can see the original (or the latest version thereof).